To the editor:
Everyone from the elderly to those on disability are facing a danger of having to rob Peter to pay Paul just to survive, choosing between food or meds or between food and fuel. They have to make some tough choices either to go back to a job market that barely has jobs or to put up their automobiles and use public transportation. In rural Maine we are not that lucky; we have here Aroostook Regional Transportation which runs on a fairly tight schedule and restraints where they can go and not go and in rural areas like Ashland or Oxbow and surrounding communities it is maybe one day a week.
As for communications some are lucky to even have a cell phone or a phone or even Internet access. As for sufficient medical insurance that is barely attainable for some — California has begun kicking thousands off their welfare rolls and ending or cutting public services to save money. We could be next or our neighbors, family and friends — anyone on fixed incomes is now affected in this recession. Everything has doubled in price — food, fuel, basic needs and in some cases medicine.
So those who had to stop working because of their disability might need to go back to work just to survive. The economic crisis has doubled the price of most everything when it concerns basic needs of families, the poor and the elderly and those who are disabled are getting the worst of it; there is a quote that fits this dilemma.
“The truest measure of a society is how it treats its elderly, its pets and its prisoners, its poor.”
To accept this quote you need only look at California and how it is dealing with the economic crisis, and you need only look further at the partisan politics on television; the old “he said, she said” spin. Men like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly fanning the flames of the fire saying we made the mess or we are not handling it their way.
The sea of economic experts on television saying this that and the other thing, that President Obama doing this and that wrong when it concerns the economic disaster. I would laugh if it did not hurt so bad trying to survive in this disaster, cutting aid to the elderly and the poor and the disabled is not going to balance the books or improve middle class and upper class situations. It will take hard work and lots of it to dig us out of the broken economy that George Walker Bush left us, cutting aid to the citizen below the poverty line and those who are disabled and elderly isn’t going to fix it.
Ashland
